


What Will Survive of Us Is Love

by nonisland



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Developing Relationship, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Female My Unit | Byleth, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Church Route, First Time, Ghost Sex, Grief/Mourning, Post-Timeskip | War Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Wistful
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:48:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27315769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nonisland/pseuds/nonisland
Summary: She kisses his mouth this time, and he gasps. His hands rise to her arms, holding her like an anchor. She’d seen him break training swords at the Academy, bend the tines of a fork, but she’s had worse than this in tavern brawls. His fingers are rigid—they tighten this far, and no farther. But he kisses her back, his lips parting beneath hers as if he could breathe her in. As if he still needs air. His mouth tastes of frost and darkness, a little of the bitter scent of moss. Not earth, at least.Dimitri’s ghost comes back after the first time Byleth meets him, and then back again.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/My Unit | Byleth
Comments: 16
Kudos: 103





	What Will Survive of Us Is Love

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Halloween, with thanks to Ember for suggesting the title—from Philip Larkin’s poem “[An Arundel Tomb](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47594/an-arundel-tomb)” (no relation)—when I was trying to cram the entirety of Loreena McKennitt’s “[Dante’s Prayer](https://youtu.be/PUeymJ6JJno)” into becoming a title instead.
> 
> * * *

Byleth doesn’t expect to see Dimitri again.

He had died. Seteth had been very clear about that, in his gentle way. He had died, and in the wilderness of his confusion he had come to her for help, but…he must know, now. He is dead. He is past her help.

She wishes the Battle of the Bridge of Myrddin had gone differently. She doesn’t often waste time on such things—she can only fight the battle she finds herself in, and she had done as well as she could—but she does wish it: that Edelgard had never sent reinforcements from Adrestia, that Lorenz had realized before the Gloucester troops ever reached the bridge instead of four hours into the battle that he’d taken the wrong side. Then they could have dealt with Acheron’s troops quickly enough and had resources to spare when Gilbert came to ask for help for Dimitri.

She plays the battle over and over in her head. If they could, perhaps, have gone around—no, not a river of that size. What would work for a merc company wouldn’t work for an army. If she had made it her first priority to get to Lorenz himself, instead of defeating the soldiers he was commanding—maybe. Maybe. But she hadn’t known it would be worth the risk. Maybe, with all the Gloucester troops watching him in their shiny polished armor with the feather plumes intact, it wouldn’t have been.

She could go mad revising and revising a battle, pushing the flow of time backwards. All of her old students and colleagues had made it out of the other side of the Battle of the Bridge of Myrddin alive. At the time, that had been enough.

And then Gilbert’s request and Seteth telling her they had to refuse him, but by then it had been too late to turn back the hands of time easily. She’d been too tired to push that far back. She hadn’t done it.

And then the Battle of Gronder Field.

Byleth can remember the mock battle they’d had there as if it really had been only a few months ago. Dimitri had complimented her and Edelgard both so earnestly. He and Claude had both hoped they would never need to raise blades against each other in earnest. Edelgard must have been planning her war even then, but she had smiled and chatted with the other two. And they had had the feast Claude had suggested, with round dances and laughter and plenty of food.

Dimitri had been…so sweet at the Academy. Troubled, yes, with that darkness she and Sothis had both sensed, but sweet. He had volunteered for missions with her, asked for training. He had offered her his own strength to revenge herself on her father’s killers.

She would have saved him, if she could have. She wonders if that’s why his spirit had come to her.

* * *

But he does come back, two days later when Byleth is trying to polish a nick out of her sword. She looks up and there he stands, new scars and ruined eye and all. He had grown taller and broader while she was sleeping. She had still recognized him without hesitation, and it’s only now that she wonders at that.

“I meant to ask a favor of you, Professor.” His voice has changed too. It’s rougher, harsher, as scarred as his face.

She puts down the sword. “You’re dead.”

“I realized that,” he says. He reaches for a spear leaning against the wall. His fingers curl through it, not around it. “I am helpless. Professor…I died without getting revenge for my family and for all the people of Duscur, slaughtered by the whim of that woman and her allies.”

Byleth tilts her head in confusion. The shadowy group that she realizes Seteth fears seems to have few women among its ranks, or at least few women who have fought their ragged army. Adrestia also seems to have mostly male leaders and generals, apart from Ladislava, who can’t be more than a few years older than Edelgard. “That woman?”

“Edelgard,” Dimitri snarls.

“She was only a child,” Byleth says. Older than a child when she desecrated the Holy Tomb, certainly, but Edelgard is Dimitri’s age, and Dimitri had been only a boy when his family was killed.

She wishes _that_ battle had gone differently, too, but how far would she have had to turn back the flow of time to save Edelgard? Impossibly far. Moons and moons. And Edelgard had never asked to be saved, only to have Byleth and the Sword of the Creator on her side. If Edelgard had asked, even then…well. She hadn’t. Byleth has nothing else to say.

Dimitri…almost hesitates. Almost. “She allied with them,” he says. “They killed her mother, too. I would never have done such a thing, and neither would you, Professor, I _know_ this.”

“They hurt her,” Byleth says. She remembers Edelgard’s nightmares. She thinks of them every time they look at another massed and gleaming company of Imperial soldiers—Edelgard screaming and crying, Edelgard telling her after in a shaking voice what had happened. Byleth has never had siblings that she knows of, but she can imagine watching her father die, nine times. She did it twice. That was bad enough. “Anyone can break.”

Dimitri’s mouth flattens, and she knows he knows this too. “You would have me give up my quest for vengeance, when the dead demand it of me?”

“Dimitri,” Byleth says quietly. She looks at him steadily until he returns her gaze.

Standing, the top of her head would not even reach his chin. His hair is tangled and dull, his armor spattered with blood. His right cheek is raggedly scarred to the side of the scars stretching from under his eyepatch, whether from an attack on his blind side or pure mischance she couldn’t guess. His cape is dark wool, the fur at the top something thicker and coarser than even wolf—bear, maybe. The prince of Faerghus’s ghost is nothing like the shining boy with his satin cape who had so earnestly praised her skill in battle and asked her to consider teaching his house.

Maybe none of this would have happened if she had. If she hadn’t seen something of herself in Edelgard, or if she had been willing to take a greater risk, go a little further into the unfamiliar.

“What is it?” Dimitri asks at last.

Byleth, still quietly, says, “You’re the only dead here.”

Dimitri looks around. His lips part as if to speak.

Just then there are voices in the hallway. Byleth doesn’t look away this time, but he still vanishes between one breath and the next.

The door opens. Ashe and Ignatz come in discussing draw weight. Byleth blanks out her frustration and nods a greeting to them both. They have questions for her about archery tactics that a besieging army can use, and she does her best to answer. They _are_ her students. They chose her, they followed her, and she will not steer them wrong.

* * *

Dimitri comes back again a week later.

“Professor,” he says, his voice softer than it had been, facing her across her desk.

Byleth sets aside her notes on civilian resettlement. Dorothea, Yuri, and Mercedes had all come to her with worries about war orphans. Yuri had actually had a few suggestions about what could be done, but all of his experience assumes a stable base of operations, and Byleth…lacks one of those, especially of the scale they’d need. There are far too many orphans, and she knows there will only be more before they’re done. She has a ruined monastery, Abyss, and an army camp, and even Yuri admits that Abyss right now is a poor place for them.

“I had meant—I apologize for my harshness when we last spoke.” There’s a restless energy to Dimitri, an urgency like cracking earth in spring. “It was not my intention to burden you with my own old failures. That was not why I sought you out. It is the newer ones, the people who died…”

“They chose to die with you,” Byleth says. That she believes absolutely. It had been clear even when he was still a student that he could inspire great loyalty. He had the same charisma that Edelgard and Claude do, but Edelgard wields hers like an axe and Claude uses his as a smokescreen. …Used? No, she doesn’t believe Claude is dead. She won’t believe it.

Dimitri, though—Dimitri had left his heart unguarded. Maybe the Dimitri who’d slogged waking through the five years she’d slept no longer had, but the boy she had known had been hearth-fire, warm as well as bright.

He shakes his head. “It was my responsibility to care for them, and I failed in it. I should have protected them, I should have…” He can hardly say he should have died for them when he _has_ , but Byleth can see the struggle not to on his face. “As their prince, I must…Professor, what will become of Faerghus?”

A good question. It’s one Byleth has no answer for. Seteth has been all but saying that _she_ will need to take over ruling Fódlan in the sudden collapse of structure—she, Byleth Eisner, ex-merc, raised on the road and on the run—and Flayn seems as excited by the idea as Byleth herself isn’t.

“What do you want to become of Faerghus?” she asks, since she can’t ask Claude what he wants to become of Leicester—Lorenz will do, he’d trained for it once, but she still wishes Claude had left a message—and she already knows what Edelgard wants to become of, well, everything. Ferdinand will help there as best he can, but they’re still sorting out everything his father never told him. And Faerghus, unlike the other two lands, doesn’t have a council of ministers or a roundtable of lords, just the Blaiddyd monarch. Or it did.

Dimitri frowns. He looks uncertain, almost lost. “I want it free of Imperial control. I could not…there is not enough of my army left to free Fhirdiad. If you can liberate it, and free the West from Cornelia…” He lifts a hand to his ruined eye.

If Byleth had a heart, it might have turned over at the pain on his face. “We will,” she says. It is a reckless promise, but it’s the same as promising to win the war. With Edelgard dead or surrendered and stripped of power, the advances she made into other territories will be wiped out. Promising to take Fhirdiad is no different than promising to take Enbarr, and she assures everyone that they can do that. She has been planning for it for months.

Dimitri takes a deep breath. “I want…my army. My officers, but the common soldiers too. Their families—when you free Fhirdiad, if there is still money for pensions, please. Bonuses, if you can, for everyone who died or was maimed at Gronder.”

Byleth takes a blank piece of paper and makes a note. Hopefully there will be records somewhere of what kind of pensions are needed, or enough surviving senior officers of the Faerghus army to say. Hopefully there will be records of where to _send_ them, too.

“I trust your judgment in caring for and protecting the people of Faerghus. I have always—” He shakes his head. “I respect you greatly. I know you will do well by them. That is what I meant to tell you last time.”

Byleth nods deeply in acknowledgement. She isn’t as good with words as Dimitri is. She doesn’t know what to say to something like that.

“But Duscur,” Dimitri says, closing his good eye. His voice is thick with tears, though none fall. “Please. Professor, you knew Dedue. He was a good man. I swore to him—I wanted to build a Faerghus where he could be seen as my equal, not hated for something his people had never done.”

Dedue _had_ been a good man, compassionate as well as loyal. Impulsively, Byleth reaches out to touch the back of Dimitri’s hand.

Her fingers brush across the cool metal of his gauntlet.

Her breath catches. She hears Dimitri’s startled inhale, the memory of lungs even now rotting in some grainfield to the east.

He touches her desk with his other hand. His fingers press into the wood like it’s jelly, half-sinking but nothing further than that. “Professor?”

“I don’t know,” Byleth says.

She wishes Sothis were here. She always wishes Sothis were still here, but it’s been a while since the last baffling new thing. She had heard Sothis’s voice when she first woke outside the monastery, but nothing since, not even in dreams. _Please?_ she thinks, even though it’s only been a few hours since reveille and Sothis didn’t answer then. _Sothis?_

Her voice echoes and echoes inside her own head, as if she’s shouting into the depths of a cave. Sothis doesn’t answer.

Dimitri steps away from her—the air feels warm against her fingertips where they’d touched—and tries to pick up a book. His hand goes right through it.

Byleth pushes her chair back from her desk and circles around until she’s at Dimitri’s side. She lifts his hand from the book and takes it between hers. The leather of his glove isn’t any warmer than the metal of his armor. She has to fight the urge to chafe it. The cold won’t hurt him, and there’s nothing she can do to warm him up.

His fingers flex against hers, and then still with an effort she can almost feel. His hand trembles. She tightens her grip. “Duscur,” she says. She wants to say she’ll find a way. She wishes with all the heart she doesn’t have that she could, but she doesn’t know anything about governing. This isn’t like a battle plan. She’s still finding her way, and she won’t lie to him. Still, she means it as a promise.

He must take it as one, because now he does weep. The first tear fades into mist as it falls.

Byleth lifts a hand to his face. The next tear smears wet against his cold jaw. His stubble pricks her fingers. The roughness of it feels like blood rushing back to frost-numbed skin.

“My apologies, Professor,” Dimitri says, pulling away. He bows to her as if she is still someone in authority over him.

She starts to protest, but he’s gone, into mist and then air just like that single tear.

Her fingertips are still damp. She touches one to her tongue and tastes salt.

* * *

She’d thought that promising to care for his people had been what Dimitri needed from her, but she wakes in the waning days of the moon with a sense that someone is watching her.

 _Sothis?_ , she thinks, reflexive.

Sothis doesn’t answer. Dimitri stands by her door, not so much lit up by the moonlight as…visible to her somehow, the lines of his body echoed in faint light.

Byleth thinks of foxfire, and then of will-o-the-wisps. She sits up anyway. She doesn’t reach for her sword.

“I’m sorry for intruding, Professor,” Dimitri says. “I had not…realized the hour.”

“Come in,” she says. He’s already in, but she knows he’ll fuss if she doesn’t invite him. It’s the middle of the night, by the position of the dim shapes of moonlight on the floor, but this isn’t the worst time one of the Resistance Army has woken her. She gets up and lights a candle, then pulls the chair over facing her bed and sits across from it, left leg extended. “Sit down.”

Dimitri, very hesitantly, crosses the room and touches his booted ankle to her bare one. A chill runs up her leg and across her skin. In the dim light of the candle it’s hard to say if he’s blushing, but she thinks he might be. He sits, and the chair mostly stays under him.

“I am most sincerely sorry for disturbing your sleep,” Dimitri says again. “I apologize for—for any impropriety, as well.”

Like this, if it weren’t for the eyepatch and the scars—if it weren’t for the fact that only her touch allows him to do something as simple as sit on a chair instead of falling through it—he sounds like the Dimitri she used to know. Older, and sadder, but gentle again. Maybe he would always have been like this, if she had been there. If she hadn’t chosen Edelgard, then unchosen her in the raw chaos of a war.

Fifteen moons for Byleth. Six years of the flow of time itself. It would kill her to try.

Fight the battle she finds herself in. “What do you need?”

Dimitri shakes his head. “I…you say that the dead of my family don’t demand I avenge them, and it’s true that they no longer follow me.”

She’s seen King Lambert’s face on coins, and he had a great deal of Dimitri about him. Glenn Fraldarius must have looked like his brother and father. Anselma von Arundel…maybe, except Byleth thinks from how Edelgard spoke of her that the consort of two kings couldn’t possibly have blended into a crowd. They had never followed him, or at least not if Byleth has always been able to see spirits—or even if she only had since Sothis merged with her. She wishes it hadn’t taken Dimitri his own death to realize that.

She nods encouragingly.

“But how can they be at peace? I cannot…” Dimitri rests his face in his hands. His shoulders, under the great bulk of his cloak, sag. “You say my comrades chose to die for me. How can I be forgiven for leading them to death, and pain, and failure? What have I done, that makes me worthy of their deaths?”

Byleth’s eyes sting with tears. _Sothis_ , she thinks again, helpless. “I don’t know the words,” she says. There’s probably a ritual of some kind, maybe with water. “But…do you believe something happened to me in the Sealed Forest, six years ago?”

Edelgard had believed it right away, but Edelgard had seen it herself. Dimitri hadn’t been there.

But he says, “The goddess gave you her power, just as she did Saint Seiros in the legend of old. There was always something extraordinary about you. She must have seen your goodness and your strength, and sent you to end this war.”

The heart Byleth doesn’t have clenches, a starburst of pain between her ribs. “Come here.” She wonders if she’s imagining the faintest echo to her own words, not an endless cave but at least a cellar.

Dimitri stands, walks the single step to her. Sinks to his knees at her feet, as if her battered little room is the cathedral repaired again, her threadbare nightshift the archbishop’s glittering cape. She has the crown somewhere on her dresser, but Dimitri looks up at her as if she’s already wearing it.

“I don’t know the words,” she says again, and takes his face between her hands, “but I forgive you.” That doesn’t sound right. “You are forgiven.” She presses her lips to his brow, right where a worry crease had already started to form. The chill is fading from his skin beneath her fingers, against her mouth.

His body shakes with a sob. She doesn’t let go. His tears this time are already warm as they trickle across her skin.

The right words are probably in some book somewhere—Seteth would know—but nobody had ever taught Byleth how to forgive sins in the name of the goddess. She isn’t really sure Rhea was ever much for forgiving sins. Maybe there aren’t words for it in the Church of Seiros after all. “Some battles can’t be won with the resources you have,” she tells Dimitri, just as she’d tell any green recruit screaming in the infirmary tent, waking up their battalion crying for the dead. “You did everything you could.”

“Professor,” he says, almost choking on the word. He’d been a child at the Tragedy of Duscur. He’d been twenty-three when he died. He couldn’t have saved them.

She eases a questioning finger under the cord to his eyepatch.

Dimitri fights for control of his voice. “It’s…not a pretty sight. You don’t want to take it off.”

She waits, hand still cupping his cheek protectively. Finally he nods, and only then she removes it. There’s a twisted mass of scarring all around the sunken socket, even across his closed eyelid, all framed by the ugly edge of mis-set bone. It must have been agony.

“You can’t,” Dimitri says as she leans closer again.

Byleth can. She does, brushing her lips as lightly as she can across the ruin of his eye, not wanting to hurt him worse with her touch. He shudders under her hands all the same. “They loved you,” she says. “That’s why they followed you.”

The noise he makes is wounded, a voiceless whimper that raises the hair on her arms.

“If I had led your army…” she says. She doesn’t know where that thought leads except to madness, to fighting against time that isn’t even a river but a waterfall. Dimitri has no pulse under her fingers, where her thumbs press against the great veins under his jaw.

“We would have followed you, wherever you told us to go. I would have followed you.” The hard lines of his shoulders are easing, the strain around his lips and the set of his jaw. His good eye flutters closed, his face still turned up to hers.

Byleth thinks, _But I wouldn’t have let you die._

She kisses his mouth this time, and he gasps. His hands rise to her arms, holding her like an anchor. She’d seen him break training swords at the Academy, bend the tines of a fork, but she’s had worse than this in tavern brawls. His fingers are rigid—they tighten this far, and no farther. But he kisses her back, his lips parting beneath hers as if he could breathe her in. As if he still needs air. His mouth tastes of frost and darkness, a little of the bitter scent of moss. Not earth, at least.

She tries to smooth her hand down his neck but it catches in the rough depths of his cloak trim. She tugs at the cloak, impatient, and Dimitri pulls away with a shaking exhale and unhooks it from his armor. Then, slowly, he unclasps his elbow caps and vambraces and pulls his gauntlets off.

His hands are scarred too. They’re old scars, and a healer has been at them, but shining red lines still web across the skin. He looks up at her, face soft and uncertain.

As if she’d turn him away for this. Byleth lifts his right hand to her mouth and kisses the palm, then the fingers where the scarring is thickest. Calluses have risen under the scars, twisting them further. He’d been burned, sometime, badly enough that even with the healing his skin should still be hot against her lips, but it isn’t. It’s moss-bitter again, the cold of shadowed hollows before dawn.

“Oh,” Dimitri breathes, staring up at his hand in hers. “I thought…you would mind, but the gauntlets are—I was afraid I would hurt you.”

She shakes her head.

“May I—no, I shouldn’t ask.”

There are things she’d refuse, but not many. Not if he asks for them, kneeling wounded at her feet with an aching awe softening his face. “What?”

His gaze falters. “…Will you kiss me again?”

Byleth doesn’t think it’s what he’d meant to ask, but she will—gently, at first, and then deeper again. When she catches his lip between her teeth iron blooms with his shiver, not blood but the memory of it.

Okay, then. She kisses even the echoes of cold from his mouth: the winter, the night, the shadow, the bitterness. She gives him fire and candlelight with the stroke of her tongue, sunshine in the sweep of her hands down his armored back. He shakes against her and opens, all sweet invitation now. She kisses his jaw, the top of his throat, and he leans back into her grip to let her, his breath catching and breaking again and again. Then she runs into his armor again, this time the unforgiving edge of his gorget.

That won’t come off without most of the rest of his armor—the spaulders, the cuirass, probably the rerebraces too. She doesn’t have the familiarity with full plate armor that she does with the mix of mail and leather and a few solid pieces that her father had worn and his company still wears. She has no idea if Dimitri is willing to pull away that much protection, even though he’s dead.

“May I kiss you too?” Dimitri asks softly. “Is it all right?” His scarred hands are to either side of her, resting on the edge of the bed, not touching.

Byleth nods.

Unlike him she isn’t wearing armor at all, only an old nightshift. It’s unbleached, un-embroidered linen, one of the same two nightshifts she’s had since before Rhea even hired her. It’s suited for an ex-merc, the daughter of a merc. There’s nothing fancy about it. But the sleeves are short and the neck scoops low, and it isn’t going to get in Dimitri’s way.

She picks up one of his hands and guides it to her waist, then the other. She wants to put one of them on her breast. Her nipples are drawn to aching points, and every time she breathes her nightshift rubs against them, but he’d asked if he could kiss her, not grope her.

His fingers flex against her sides—long fingers, broad, deft even with the calluses and the scars—and then steady. He leans up to kiss her throat, his mouth trailing down the side of her neck. He presses kisses across her collarbone, the hollow at the base of her throat. His mouth is hot now. The wet curl of his tongue sends sparks flying down her spine, and she pulls him closer.

Dimitri’s hands ease up her ribs. He kisses her jaw, the soft spot behind her earlobe, her mouth again. She’s breathless with it. His fingers are spread just under her breasts now, not touching, not enough.

“You can,” she says against his cheek, the question he hasn’t asked yet. He’s giving her the unscarred side of his face when he can, the left side, nearly smooth. Hasn’t she shown him yet?

But there is no unscarred side of his hands. His fingers curve around the underside of her breast carefully, almost reverently, as if he’s afraid she didn’t mean that. As if, even now, he thinks she’ll turn him away. He draws back to look up at her and she nods.

Byleth is usually quiet in bed like she is anywhere else, but she makes a sound when his fingers graze her nipple. Just a brush, but enough, when she’d been waiting for it since he kissed her back. He circles it, tracing patterns on the puckered skin at the tip of her breast, and her body tightens with yearning. Now he touches her other breast with more confidence, and Byleth pulls him closer and kisses him again, hot and urgent.

His hands are restless, stroking, rolling her nipples between his fingers and then easing away to hold the soft weight of her breasts against his palms. Every tug sends heat darting down through her abdomen, adds to the urgency of the pulse beating between her legs.

“I can hardly believe this is real,” Dimitri says, kissing her throat again, her shoulder, the skin of her chest just above her neckline where her heart would be. His voice is rough. “But I never…my dreams are nothing like this.”

He lowers one hand to her hip and kisses her breast open-mouthed through the linen of her shift, and Byleth arches into him. She sinks her fingers into his hair—long enough that she can, now, the strands enough to twist her fingers in. She’ll anchor him against the night. The next kiss is lower, his tongue flicking across her nipple before he closes his lips around it, and she pants for breath.

Her whole body is drawn tight. He’s the one who moans, though, a pleased, desperate sound against the sensitized skin of her breast. She can hardly think past Dimitri’s hands and Dimitri’s mouth and the throbbing heat of her cunt, past how badly she wants to put a hand between her legs and rock against it. She’d had no idea it could be like this.

“Will you take this off?” Dimitri asks, sitting back and touching the hem of her shift. “Only if you want, of course, but I would like to…to see you. If I may.”

Byleth yanks it off so quickly her legs don’t have time to wobble in the brief moment she’s standing. She’s completely naked under it—she’s never seen the point of wearing smallclothes to bed—and Dimitri stares at her open-mouthed, his eyes darting from her breasts down to the cluster of pale green curls and back up. She can smell her own arousal, feel the air cold against the wetness on her thighs. She wonders if he can see it.

His eyes drop again, and he swallows. “May I…”

“Let me take your armor off,” Byleth says.

“Mine?” Dimitri looks puzzled. It only strengthens her resolve.

She nods, firmly, and he stands, stepping back almost into the chair still resting behind him. His hands fumble with the buckles of his spaulders, but he gets them off, then sets to work on the rerebraces. His newly-bared shoulders shift under the linen of his shirt as he works to reach the clasps at the backs of his upper arms. Byleth doesn’t wait for him to ask for help, but stands and walks behind him, moving the chair out of the way before she touches him. The cuirass has four buckles down the back, with the Crest of Blaiddyd stamped between his shoulders, all across his ribs.

There are holes in the armor there, piercing through the Crest again and again.

She’s seen worse, she reminds herself. She’s seen worse, and on warriors who were going to be gone after. Dimitri at least…returns. He shouldn’t, but he does. She shouldn’t let him, but she will.

She works the first of the buckles loose, and then the next and the next. When she’s done he holds his arms out in front of him, silently, and she works the cuirass loose. The back of his shirt is torn to rags, the padding frayed. She gets the cuirass off and drops it to the floor, then unclasps the gorget. “Your shirt,” she says. Better to know.

But his skin is clean and whole, as if he’d never died at Gronder at all. She spreads her hand between his shoulderblades, where the Crest had been stamped and the attack had been targeted. His breath catches, a pained sound. _That’s_ cold, like the rest of his skin isn’t, with a chill that makes her wince back from it. She wonders whether she would have seen blood and bone if she’d told him to strip before she touched him. She’s glad she didn’t.

There are other scars, marks that had time to heal. She touches them with a mix of gratefulness and fear—there are so _many_ , and some of them have no place on a prince’s body. He’d been whipped, at one point. Manacle scars circle his wrists. She wonders if those happened at the same time he lost his eye. The rest are cleaner, battle-scars on his arms and sides. Some of them look very old, some not so much. She kisses them, scars and whole skin alike, and feels him shiver at every touch.

Byleth can hardly believe he could have been standing here like this, with all the wounds she can see. She’s never scarred much herself, the wounds she took healing better than anyone expected. Even her father had seemed surprised sometimes. She has a few, but nothing like the ones that cover Dimitri.

She rests a hand on his chest, feeling the firmness of the muscle there. He has no heartbeat.

They’re a matched set.

“Take off the rest of your armor,” she says.

He gets the poleyns off his knees easily enough, but hesitates at his boots. Normally he would have sat to remove them, but he can’t really do that now without Byleth’s touch. She takes the decision out of his hands and bends to loosen the boots herself.

“Professor,” he says. “You shouldn’t—”

“Byleth.”

Dimitri’s lips shape her name, but he can’t bring himself to say it. “You shouldn’t…do this for me.”

Byleth doesn’t dignify that with a response. She tugs at his ankle and he lets her lift his foot and remove his boot, then the other one. She unfastens his greaves as well, then stands up again and moves behind him to unclasp the faulds and culet where they circle his waist. He’s almost finished unbuckling the second of his cuisses, with his other thigh already bare. So much armor, and none of it had been enough. So much steel, painted dark with that bright slash of Faerghus blue. So many hours from skilled blacksmiths. So much money—for the steel, the work, the transport. And still he’d died alone in a bloody field.

The last of the armor drops from her hands. If it were hers she’d hang it, but she doesn’t have a form for Dimitri’s, and he hardly needs it to protect him now.

All he’s left in are his padded trousers, his erection straining against them. Byleth had tried to put aside her own need for Dimitri’s, but the sight of it sends another pulse of heat to her cunt. She squeezes her thighs together for relief and feels them slip against each other. It doesn’t help. She only wants more.

“Go on,” she says. She sounds strange even to her own ears.

He takes off the padded trousers, then his smalls. His cock springs up toward his stomach, the hood drawn back and the tip flushed darkly. There’s a scar on his thigh, too, higher than Byleth likes to see it—it healed well enough, but it could have damaged the leg.

He’s beautiful.

She takes his hand and pulls him toward her bed, easing him down until he’s lying with his hair spread across her pillow. She wants to keep him there. Without letting him go she settles herself between his legs and brushes her lips across his scarred thigh. His shocked inhale jolts his whole body. When she opens her mouth and traces the length of it with her tongue he moans, then tries again to protest. “You don’t need to—”

“I want to,” Byleth says, looking up. He’s half-sitting, the muscles of his abdomen standing out with the motion. “Is that okay?”

Dimitri drops back onto her pillow. “I won’t stop you, but please understand I would _never_ have presumed to a—” The rest of his sentence is lost in another moan, louder, as she wraps her hand around the base of his cock. Clear fluid wells from the slit, and she feels herself getting wetter in sympathy. She works her other hand down her stomach and rocks her mound against her palm, feeling the pressure build and more slick pulse out against her fingers.

 _Focus_ , she reminds herself, and licks the tip of Dimitri’s cock. His hands twist in her sheets. She hears fabric tear, but ignores it. He tastes bitter, as she’d expected, but not too strong, and she relaxes her lips and takes the head into her mouth. Pressing her tongue hard against the underside, just beneath the crown, gets her a choked-off sound from Dimitri and another trickle of precome. His hips jerk, not hard enough to choke her or even force her hand up against her mouth, but he gasps an apology anyway.

Byleth pulls away. “It’s okay,” she says. “You can’t hurt me.”

That’s not quite true, but it’s true enough. She lowers her head again, tightening her mouth around his cock. The fragile hardness presses against her cheeks, her tongue, the roof of her mouth as she sucks. He lifts one hand and touches her cheek with the backs of his fingers, a feather-soft touch tracing the shape of his own cock, and Byleth spreads her legs a little further and lets her fingers press against her throbbing clit. Dimitri lets his hand fall again, but she can still feel that gentle, wondering touch.

She fingers herself to the same rhythm she’s moving her hand on the lower part of his cock, feeling herself speed up as she gets closer. She can go again if she finishes before he does, if he wants to. She thinks he wants to, and that just makes her hotter, makes her push harder against her fingers.

Still, it’s Dimitri who gasps, “Please, I’m going to—”

Byleth looks up at him and nods as best she can without letting his cock out of her mouth.

“If you don’t want—”

She sucks harder, takes him as deep as she can, and he comes with a startled cry. She swallows as much of it as she can, never mind the taste, not willing to let even this much of him go.

He tries to sit up, but falls back against the pillow. “May I…do you want…”

Byleth crawls up to lie down at his side. He kisses her, which she’s surprised at, licking the taste of his own come out of her mouth until she’s breathless and desperate. She takes his hand and guides it between her legs. His fingertips slide easily on the slickness there, the strange texture of the scars making her shiver with pleasure even before they brush against her clit.

“There?” Dimitri asks, his fingers repeating the last motion even as her hand falls away from his. She nods. “Is this—is this all you want, really?”

Ripples of pleasure are already rolling through her, warnings of the wave about to break. He brings his other hand up to her breast, playing with the tip, and she feels that in her clit too.

“I could…if you wanted…” Dimitri’s fingers slow to match the uncertainty in his voice.

Byleth fights the urge to push him down and ride him. She makes an urgent questioning noise.

“I could use my mouth on you as well,” he says, his whole face soft with yearning, and Byleth squeezes her thighs around his hand, pulling it hard against her, and comes.

When she gets her eyes open again Dimitri looks even more hesitant, in spite of the new flush in his cheeks. “Ah…did you already…”

“You still can,” she says, feeling another throb of heat between her legs. “What do you want?”

He looks…shy, as he answers. A strange thing in a prince, a warrior, a ghost. “When you first kissed me, when you told me I was forgiven.” His voice shakes on the words. “Could we sit like that again?”

Byleth nods, speechless with a sudden bolt of desire. She sits up and swings her legs over the side of the bed, and Dimitri moves around her to kneel between them. He puts a hand under her thigh, pulling her closer, and bows his head.

At the first uncertain sweep of his tongue, Byleth lets her hand settle in his hair again. She doesn’t pull him closer, not yet, but she holds him, there and with her other hand on his shoulder. He licks along her folds, then moves back up toward her clit, circling until he finds it. She pushes against his mouth when he does, her cunt fluttering and clenching at the touch, and he makes a soft pleased noise and curls his tongue against her.

It’s good, it’s so good, and his hair and his broad scarred shoulders are the same summer-gold in the candlelight. He’s louder than she is about it, making a sound every time he gets any kind of reaction from her, and Byleth drops back onto one elbow and lets him. She’d never known it could be like this, either, this kind of devotion. It’s slow, but Dimitri doesn’t complain, and the pleasure starts building again, sparks curling through her body and gathering under his mouth.

Her hand in his hair tightens, pulling him closer, and he moans, the sound vibrating through her cunt. Just like that she’s on the edge again, and when he looks up, eye dark and hazed with pleasure, and does it again, she falls. It lasts longer this time, orgasm rolling through her from toes to fingertips, blurring her vision and leaving her limbs weak. She has to push Dimitri away when she’s done, the pressure of his mouth too much against her oversensitive clit.

“Was that good?” he asks, face shining with her slick.

“Mm,” Byleth agrees. She makes her mouth make words. “Yes. Perfect.”

Dimitri does blush this time.

He tries to ease her against the pillow, but by that point her arms and legs are working again, and she rolls over on top of him instead, sprawls across him like a blanket. If she can keep him here, she will.

After a moment, his arms settle around her. He still has no heartbeat, but neither does she.

She’ll keep him as long as she can.


End file.
